Knifecrime Island and its attendant Stabby and Drinky Provinces are together now beating France, Spain and Italy in cirrhosis deaths.
Friday, January 8, 2010
12
En-ger-land, En-ger-land, En-ger-land!
Wow.. why was Britain so low in the 70's?!
Early pub closings. Also, Thatcher hadn't reduced the national morale to coal dust.
Actually, no one had any money in the 70s but in the 80s it was Club Tropicana drinks are free time.
Well, they had some catching up to do.
The good news is that a pickled, cirrhotic liver is almost impervious to stabbing, and protects the more delicate inner organs from injury.
Unfortunately the Stabbys are doing a lot of their drinking in Spain, France and Italy (especially Spain)due to lower booze prices. Thanks for those half-acre pools of puke you leave in your wake, folks. Just promise to get your liver transplants at home and not on OUR national health system.
I love the BBC's complete lack of faith in their audience's ability to read a graph. So the bottom line is the UK and it's increasing? Really? Maybe it would be clearer if I had a drink.
Well but plus and talk about your lagging indicators. The origins of cirrhosis at any given moment probably go back decade or three earlier ...
We used to drink a weak, tasteless brew called English beer. I think its lack of ingredients was a result of the war and subsequent austerity. It was no threat to the liver or any other organ, except perhaps the odd penis caught in a zipper after an all-too-frequent visit to the loo. We'd all drink up and go home at 10.30pm (or 11pm in London) and get our sorry, still relatively sober asses to bed long before midnight. Thus the mid-week pub-crawling and the five-pint daily lunches.
Then came the prosperity that allows hand-made vodkas, imported gin, large glasses of single malt, post-prandial brandies, the Campaign for Real Ale, cheap plonk from the Common Market and former colonies, free hooch in Benidorm and round-the-clock boozers.
I find the French decline more remarkable.
An extended version of this needs to be in my next National Geographic.
Choire, I am both fascinated and flummoxed by this graph. Going to the BBC article and then to the government report has not resolved my state of flummoxation (flummoxicity? flummoxness? Whatever.)
I can buy the increase in liver disease in the UK, based on 1) longer pub hours, 2) the higher strength of local beer and the increased intake of wine and spirits, and 3) the UK picking up its pace of going to hell in a handbasket (read: increasing binge drinking by youth).
However, how the heck does one explain the plummeting observations of liver disease in France, Italy, and Spain? I just can't square this circle. Has liver disease run out of victims there (having already killed off most of the people who would end up on this chart)? Did aliens begin abducting health survey clerks from the Garlic Belt starting in 1980? Do we see proof here of extremist rants that Muslims have overrun Europe?
My head hurts, and I don't even drink.